Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  During his career, Hunt had also talked about retirement far more frequently than any other driver. Getting out had always been in his head, from as early as 1973. He said in 1976: “It is my ambition to retire, but I want to do it from the top, not from the dreaded slide down. When I retire, my ambition is to go back to being a normal person – one who likes other people, whom other people like.”

  That he had done. David Gray still regrets Hunt’s early exit and feels he would have turned into a David Beckham or a Tiger Woods if he had stayed active longer: “He was a world figure. If he had carried on with it, he would have been a Beckham I think.”

  CHAPTER 35

  The psychology of a champion

  A low tolerance for indolence

  No racing driver is easy to analyse. But assessing the psychology of a racing driver like James Hunt is near impossible. The closest he ever came to getting a professional assessment was when his second wife, Sarah, took him to see specialist marriage counsellors in 1985. The counsellors, attempting to analyse his psyche, told him he was a “cold fish who had difficulty showing love and affection.” He also saw a psychiatrist in this period. In truth, an accurate assessment was to prove difficult even for the most skilled psychiatrist.

  Hunt was a very intelligent man and probably understood his own problems far better than any professional analyst. But he never discussed his deep down psyche with anyone. It was simply not his style. That remained buried deep within him, and there it stayed.

  Hunt appeared to race on his nerves. His propensity to vomit before a race seems to have indicated as much. He made no attempt to hide it and would often do so in front of people quite openly. Although he suffered from nerves, in actuality he suffered no more from nerves than any other driver. Other drivers simply handled their nerves differently from Hunt.

  In the early days, when his consumption of alcohol and cigarettes was lower, it was less pronounced. But the truth was that the vomiting was a false clue to his personality. After 1969, it was never just about his nerves. It was about his high intake of alcohol and cigarettes, which facilitated an over-production of adrenalin, which then led to the vomiting. The mixture of all this in his body simply triggered a chemical reaction in his stomach to such an extent that he could only release it by vomiting before taking to the track. His total lack of embarrassment meant he didn’t mind who witnessed it either.

  No top sportsman has ever consumed as much alcohol or smoked as many cigarettes as Hunt, neither before nor since. He did both to excess. After his Formula Ford days he began smoking between 40 and 60 cigarettes a day for most of his life and, although he said he did not drink in the few days before a race, this was often not true.

  The only other top athlete known to smoke as much as Hunt and still perform at the top level was Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff, who smoked 30 cigarettes a day.

  Tony Dron disagrees with this analysis and remembers that all the drivers used to smoke in those days: “Personally, I don’t think it had any affect whatsoever on our performance. We weren’t really aware of the outside world and what was going on. Everyone smoked then.” ‘Everyone’ included Stirling Moss, who actually had a contract to promote the cigarette brand called Craven ‘A’.

  But Dron’s analysis may be faulty in light of sophisticated medical research that was not available then. It is now well-known, well-documented and widely accepted that smoking is not conducive to professional athletes. Smoking regularly causes an athlete’s airwaves to become blocked and it becomes tougher for oxygen to circulate around the body to reach vital muscles, which leads to respiratory problems. While smoking was much more common in the past and, in the short term may not have appeared to present such a problem, it would inevitably prove highly disruptive over the longer term.

  Alcohol consumption has its own problems. As alcohol stays in the system for about three days after a drink, this means the human body will suffer dehydration for the duration of those days. This leads to headaches, nausea and a lack of concentration, and cramps are even more common. If the muscles don’t receive enough fluids, they become tired and injuries are much more likely to happen – so the effects are two-fold.

  These days, an athlete’s hydration level is tested by something called an osmolarity test, which measures urine samples for water. But the test was not available when Hunt was driving. If it had been, he most certainly would have failed every time. This condition explains his desperate desire for a drink every time he stepped out of the cockpit. That desire was sometimes overwhelming and it often led to some embarrassing incidents. The worst case was after he won the 1976 Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama. It had been a tiring race and he was handed a bottle of Orangina (bottled orange juice) in the crush of getting out of his car. He was on his way to the royal box for the presentation when, as he explained: “I’d just won the race, I was tired and thirsty and this drink was the only thing I had in the world. This guy knocked it out of my hand and I punched him. It was a terrible thing to do because the poor guy hadn’t meant to, but I didn’t have time to think about it. I felt awful about it afterwards and tried to find him to apologise, but I couldn’t find him. I’m not a punchy person normally, but I’m always punchy when I get out of the car.”

  But Hunt had misread himself; he wasn’t punchy simply upon getting out of the car, but had a deep need for liquids caused by his extreme dehydration due to his various lifestyle choices.

  His only thought when he won the world championship was getting a drink, and he was captured on film desperately asking for liquids when he got out of his car in Mount Fuji in 1976.

  The nutritionists that abound in modern day Grand Prix racing would have recognised and sorted out this problem, and Hunt’s life would have been very different. But there was none of that in the mid-seventies and the condition was never treated.

  Bubbles Horsley was generally thought to be a good team manager who got the best out of Hunt when he was at Hesketh. But, in many ways, Horsley let his friend down by not insisting that he give up cigarettes and alcohol altogether. Horsley was another victim of the prevalent ignorance about the affects of both substances on sportsmen. He explains: “We never stopped him carousing. If he wanted to be on the piss all night, that was his business as long as it didn’t affect his driving. What we tried to do was focus where discipline was needed, and we did have to discipline him in both his racing and in his private life. Maybe discipline isn’t really the right word. Anyone outside your life can see you much clearer than you can perhaps see yourself. On that basis we were able to see, on occasion, that he was leading the kind of lifestyle that would not help his driving, so we tried to keep him on the straight and narrow.”

  But it wasn’t enough, and there is little doubt that Horsley would have acted differently if he had understood that it was the combination of adrenaline, alcohol and cigarettes that was most likely causing the vomiting. He might also have better understood the need to keep his driver constantly hydrated while he was in the cockpit.

  Jean-Pierre Jarier, who raced with Hunt in the seventies, believes that more discipline was needed in the Hesketh days: “James had no limits and he drank with Bubbles Horsley and the gang. Unfortunately, he paid a big price for that.”

  The condition sometimes manifested itself when Hunt retired from a race early. There was a world of difference between an abrupt stop after an accident and a controlled stop where he had a lap to think about it. The oversupply of adrenaline was then at its peak. Hunt seemed to recognise the situation in himself, saying that his adrenaline overload often took the form of excess ire: “When the race suddenly stops, whatever happens – an accident or a mechanical problem – I’m always in a highly emotional, discharging state. To open that emotional door at the end of four or five days is obviously a great relief. I think it’s a normal and human way to behave, and if it upsets anyone that’s unfortunate. But it can put me a bit out of control.”

  To explain it to himself, he felt it was necessary –
or at least that is what he told journalists – to build himself up to an emotional peak of tension in order to achieve his best performance. That process, he said, began on a Wednesday before a race so that, by Sunday, he had worked himself up into the desired state of readiness, at which point he vomited. He never once mentioned the effects of smoking or alcohol in that process, which indicates either that he was ignorant of it or that he deliberately didn’t want to address it. He said: “I’m very nervous and you have to be nervous to the right amount. I’ve got to the point now where I can control it. I can make myself more nervous by thinking about the race, and if I’m too nervous I deliberately stop thinking about it. Now all that requires a lot of mental effort, a lot of concentration, a lot of introversion. When you’re driving, you have to be in total control of your emotions. It must be purely practical work. Otherwise you’re playing with a dangerous thing.”

  In fact, many of Hunt’s dramas were chemically- rather than emotionally-induced, as was generally believed. They seemed to arise when the chemicals inside his body became mixed up, but he always dismissed them as momentary lapses of emotional distress, common in a racing driver’s psyche.

  And ‘momentary’ was the key word. Because it was momentary, he got away with it. As he confessed: “Anger dissipates very easily in me, it’s not something I notice. My mother pointed it out a few years ago. I’ve never been a ventral person, which is odd, out of character for somebody who’s very naturally competitive. I get angry when people treat me unfairly, or what I perceive to be unfairly, but after getting angry I then get on with my life. I’m too much of a forward-looker to dwell on past aggravations, and I think that was the case there.”

  Alastair Caldwell, his team manager at McLaren, admitted he had never seen a driver as nervous as Hunt. “Before a race, a lot of my drivers pretended to be sleeping. Either they would be overcome by adrenaline or, in an attempt to control it, they would go into a passive mode and try to lower their metabolism by dozing. But James couldn’t keep still. He would pace around the garage, chain-smoking cigarettes, putting his helmet on, then taking it off again and he nearly always threw up in the pits. It would get worse when we brought the car out onto the grid. Just before the start, he would get so uptight that the car was actually shaking on the grid. If you sat on the sidepod with him in the cockpit, his legs would be going up and down like jackhammers and you would think the engine was running. He was banging against the inside of the car, physically shaking and banging.”

  Teddy Mayer, the McLaren team owner, often witnessed what he called “James’ emotional kettle boiling over.” As he recalls: “I suppose it’s not a bad way for a driver to be. They’ve got to have some fire and determination and at least if he blows off steam, it’s gone. If he carried it around bottled up, it could do all sorts of harm. So I don’t see that as a particularly bad characteristic. It might be unpleasant for a few moments, but you can learn to live with that.”

  But Mayer didn’t make any attempt to prevent Hunt drinking alcohol or smoking. Ironically, it was BBC producer Mark Wilkin who first made an effort to change Hunt’s ways, and Hunt responded very positively. At Wilkin’s first ever race at Monaco in 1988, Hunt turned up merry, swigging from a bottle of rosé. Wilkin calmly took the bottle and replaced it with a bottle of water. Later, he told Hunt he was a much better commentator when sober and Hunt took it to heart. The difference in the standard of his work when he stopped drinking is clearly evident upon reviewing old TV tapes. Wilkin had a much better and more decisive relationship with Hunt than did any of his team bosses when he was racing.

  It wasn’t just Mayer who got the abuse; his other team principals, Bubbles Horsley and Peter Warr, also suffered from it and really had only themselves to blame. Horsley said: “We were all on a learning curve [in 1973], and when I made mistakes on the management side, he was very hard on me, accusing me of costing him races and so on. It would get quite heated, but, after I learned my trade, I would give him a hard time. I’d say: ‘Look, you’re not going to make it if you carry on like this. You’re wasting our time. A lot of money is going into this and you’re letting the side down.’” When it got down to the real, base emotional level, Hunt always responded and Horsley was gradually able to mould him into something more acceptable. One of the more persistent problems was Hunt’s “me-against-the-world attitude”, which was something he could not shake. He definitely felt let down when driving for the Wolf team in 1979, as Peter Warr explains: “When his car broke down, he’d jump out shouting: ‘This car’s a fucking heap of shit.’ You’d just reel under the shock of his onslaught.”

  Harvey Postlethwaite was exposed to it for most of the four out of seven years he spent in Formula One, and says: “He was never cool, calm and collected, and he’d always be losing his temper and complaining and whinging and moaning before a race.”

  Hunt must certainly have been aware of it himself, but he made no attempt to alter his response to pressure. Jochen Mass, his teammate at McLaren in 1976 and 1977, was in a very good position to witness all this but doesn’t think fully Hunt understood his own psyche at all: “You have a lot of footballers who go wrong because they can’t take the pressure, but James was good with that. He could live up to that. He just searched for something within himself, he was constantly running after something. I don’t know whether he knew what it was.”

  Maybe it was because it all came too easily to him. Hunt’s approach to motor racing was very different from that of the mainstream. He was an effortlessly gifted sportsman, who, if he hadn’t made it in Formula One, would have succeeded at the highest level in up to a half a dozen other sports. As top journalist Peter Windsor put it in 1976, Hunt had an “above-average belief in himself ”, which was putting it very mildly. Windsor wrote: “All racing drivers appear to be egoists, but with Hunt it is more so. He depends on his almost disassociated self-confidence, which sits easily on his casually clad shoulders.” Or as Caldwell said: “James had a fantastic ego, but then of course all racing drivers do. He believed he was king of all he surveyed.” But Hunt was by no means a narcissist. Despite the self-belief, he had virtually nil self-regard, and it was this inherent contradiction that made him the complex and complicated man he was.

  Hunt always dismissed any criticism of his over-developed ego. He believed it was confidence and lack of pressure that had helped him most in his endeavours. He blamed most of his problems on pressure, and never gave a thought to lifestyle as a contributing factor.

  The situation was confused because he often spoke gobbledygook to journalists, who typically printed exactly what he said without fully understanding it. Like all clever and intelligent people, sometimes Hunt liked the sound of his own voice rather too much, even when it was making little sense. This is demonstrated all too clearly in his book Against All Odds, written in his own words in 1976. Whilst much of it appears to offer concise and considered wisdom, some of it is utter nonsense, with the author seemingly unable to differentiate between the two – which is perhaps the way Hunt liked it. For example, he writes: “I think most people who win the world championship do [feel confident], because you’ve reached the ultimate pinnacle and it gives you a new dimension of confidence; you feel very on top of the world. And I was pretty confident through that half of 1976 too, when I was knocking off win after win. But to sort it all out gives you a new relaxed confidence and this all helps you in sport, so long as you maintain your mental preparation and your competitive edge, and building yourself up right with that sort of tension, to be relaxed is vital. It does give you a little bit more relaxation. And I think that probably, yes, for sure, I was driving better. I had everything and I was really enjoying it.”

  No one denies that Hunt was full of self-belief and utter confidence, but what made him such a confusing character was the sliver of disbelief that ran through his character and which sometimes became apparent upon those rare occasions when he talked about it. It was the belief that he couldn’t do something until h
e did it. It seems to explain his relative underperformance right through his days of Formula Ford, Formula 3 and Formula 2.

  All his team managers have something to say about getting the best out of him, and much of it relates to qualifying. Although he scored a race win and came very close to winning three or four other races in his first three years of Formula, Hunt never really got a sniff of pole position. And it appeared to be the result of a complete lack of confidence that he could actually be the fastest driver of all. It also seemed to relate to the fact that he had nothing to prove at Hesketh in Formula One. He continually performed better than the team expected, and there was little motivation to be a better qualifier. He appeared to be frightened of the front row of the grid.

  Bubbles Horsley eventually worked this out and often told the story of the techniques he used to motivate Hunt during qualifying. When the car was stationary in the pit lane with the driver aboard, Horsley would tell the mechanics to work slowly, knowing it would infuriate Hunt, who would then get worked up and perform better. Horsley admitted: “He’d be straining away at his seatbelts, saying: ‘What’s going on?’ He’d be waving and gesticulating and you’d see the anger in his eyes. You’d nod to the mechanic, drop the car and say: ‘It’s okay now.’ He’d go out and do a blistering lap, and come back and give us a bollocking – ‘incompetent amateurs.’ We didn’t do it every time because it wouldn’t work.”